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hectacre << hectare

On a documentary I was watching last night, one of the speakers referred to the number of “hectacres” in a plot.

She meant “hectare,” a term built out of the scientific (Greek) prefix for hundred, “hecto-“ and the word “are.” An are is defined by the metric system to be an area of 100 sq. m., so a hectare is 10,000 sq. m. For comparison purposes, hectares are often related to acres (1 hectare = 2.471 acres), which probably leads English speakers, who seldom hear the term “are,” to replace it with “acre.”

Very common on the web. Examples:

Camping site: “El cañon de Somoto is a 125 hectacre canyon and a National Monument of Nicaragua….”

Gold mining thread: “To confirm, I checked a few other claims and the cells correlate to the hectacres as shown against the leaser. ”

Glasgow history site: “Initially it was small, about 0.25 hectacre, by 1910 it had grown to 0.35 hectacre. By the time of the 1932 map below, it had expanded, stretched down to the canal bank and covered 2.1 hectacre .”